I like a good time travel novel. Outlander and Time Traveler's Wife are two of my favorites. So for Black History Month, what better than Octavia Butler's famous time travel entry, Kindred. I listened to this one on audio and the narration was... not great. The narration made weakness in some of the dialogue obvious. And the narrator used the same voice for Rufus from when he was a inquisitive six year old through when he was a ruthless 25 year old man.Had the narration not been off, I may have lent my own imaginative gravitas to some of the dialogue where it was lacking. The premise of the book is that Dana, an black women living in 1970s Los Angeles gets sucked back in time to 1810 to help her generations ago relative and white Maryland plantation owner who keeps almost dying, requiring her help.Dana is married to a white man, Kevin, and when she pops back into her own time after being confronted with the barrel of a gun by Rufus' father, they both seem alarmed but also very casual about the fact that Dana just traveled back in time. It's a moment that is shockingly devoid of feeling. Perhaps we just don't know Dana well enough yet. She proves over the course of the book to be alarmingly practical even in the face of startling cruelty.I understand the premise of the book is how easy it is to slip into they rhythms and requirements of slavery, even for someone who is so outside the experience, but Dana's tone and approach to the whole thing came off a little mechanical and more geared toward furthering the point rather than developing her own character.As the relationship between Dana and Rufus changes over time as Rufus grows into his expected role and Dana continues to insist on her own independence, things become increasingly tense and the stakes for Dana become increasingly high.Overall, I enjoyed this book and premise but it wasn't quite as good as it could have been.
3/5 Stars.
I finished this book this month shortly before the passing of Katherine Johnson who lived a long and distinguished life and is a real American hero. My daughter has a children's book about Katherine that she loves to read.
Hidden Figures is an impeccably researched book that follows the lives of the first black Computers at NACA (later NASA). These brilliant minds like Dorothy Vaughn, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson worked their way up through a system that was stacked against them to gain success and respect. The fact that Katherine Johnson was brilliant enough to probably be a head at NASA is not lost on the reader, but in the 1950s-1970s, that was just not going to happen for a black woman and it's truly NASA's loss.I loved the strong supportive community Shetterly describes among the women of West Computing. That Dorothy and Mary both made choices to boost up others around them for opportunities and deserved accolades at the expense of their own career trajectories.The scope of the book was enormous. Beginning in the late years of WWII through the hey day of the space program, Hidden Figures sheds light on the contributions of black women and some men to the programs that shaped our imaginations and air superiority. I loved the extra details about Nichelle Nichols and how Martin Luther King Jr. himself convinced her to stick with Star Wars to show that science and the future was multi-racial and multi-gender.While this book can get a little tedious when the science meets the page, it's the enduring spirit of Dorothy, Mary, and Katherine that keep bringing the reader back to the text.
4/5 Stars.
This is the third nonfiction book I've read by a WOC this year (black woman to be specific) and I'm so glad to be hearing these new voices and growing in understanding of a life experience I am not closely familiar with. So This Will Be My Undoing was a deliberate pick by me to do better, to be more aware and to really just appreciate the story of someone who I might otherwise never had heard from.I loved Morgan's essay which explored living in Harlem and what Harlem meant and how she saw it. I loved thinking about spaces outside of a white gaze. I am accustomed to looking at culture through my own white lens. My own (flawed and often unconscious) judgments are based on the white norms I have accepted and reinforced. The ways in which I expect people to ask, the conformity I expect them to accept is based on expectations that have their origin in white supremacy. Maybe the first step of allyship is to really listen to the stories of POC and specifically WOC and specifically black women. I'm there. I'm doing that part. And now it feels not quite enough. Like this is the baseline. This is the absolute minimum. Morgan talks about going to Japan as a middle school and then undergrad student. And during that time there she would walk into a store and the attentive sales people would help her and ask if she needed anything. This was such a mind blowing experience that she couldn't wait to see her own mother experience it as well. Wait, back up. Yep, that's what I wrote. This brilliant, beautiful, multi-lingual woman was feeling truly seen, by a sales clerk. Shit, America we are doing something dreadfully wrong if we can't even up our game to baseline dignity and respect for women of color by saying hello and asking if they need help when they enter our shops. Phoebe Robinson told a similar story about going to a Michael's store and standing at the framing counter waiting to be helped. (You can read my review of Phoebe's book, You Can't Touch My Hair here). She wasn't even acknowledged and several other customers walked in later and were helped in front of her. So, yes. This is a problem. This is a embarrassing basic problem. We need to not only see WOC, but we need to allow them to take up whatever space they need AND be fine with it.
4/5 Stars.
“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”In February, I try to focus my reading on black authors and black history. Between the World and Me has been on my list for quite some time. I've seen Ta-Nehisi Coates in videos and on the daily show, and I've always appreciated his perspective on issues and the way in which he presents them. A letter from a father to a son. A letter from a black man to a black teen. A letter from a black man to white America. A letter from the soul of a person, to the unending silence that answers us in return whenever we share something so deep that no response is adequate.This is a very moving and illuminating look at race and racism in America. In the way that the belief in American exceptionalism requires an ignorance of the policies and practices which have propelled the American experience for centuries. “And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.”It would be wrong to say Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only voice discussing race, politics, and intersectionality in America. He is however, one of the most powerful voices to recently take up the conversation. It would also be wrong to assume that his view is representative of all African Americans. Or that he can speak for black women who have not gained the name-recognition, but still have powerful and illuminating stories all their own. But anytime we take a step outside ourselves and our known world to try to really hear and understand the experience of someone else, without judgment - whenever we are really open to listening with our ears and mind open, then the collective experience of being American is all the better. All the better that this audio version was narrated by Coates himself. I was moved by this book, truly moved. And humbled. And thankful.
5/5 Stars.
I went to law school so the words "Epic Courtroom Battle" were sure to catch my eye. And since I went to law school I am aware that there is such a thing as the Southern Poverty Law Center. And I live in America and am aware that lynching was a terrible crime against people of color, mostly in the American South, during the civil rights movement and before. So the most shocking thing in reading this book, was the fact that the lynching in question, the lynching that launched the epic courtroom battle mentioned, happened in Mobile, Alabama in 1981.
Yep, 1981. I was actually alive that year and while I don't remember it at all, it's shocking and heartbreaking and maddening that a lynching happened in America in my lifetime. Michael Donald was 19 years old when he had the misfortune of walking down the street in Alabama by himself at night, where he was approached by Tiger Knowles and Henry Hayes. He was beaten, choked, and had his throat slashed before he was thrown in the trunk of a car, driven to Mobile, and hung from a tree.
That Knowles and Hayes were KKK members shouldn't be surprising. And that Mobile authorities did little to investigate and solve the crime shouldn't be surprising either. Leamer's tale takes us up through the end of Knowles and Hayes' criminal trials. Trials which would not have happened without Michael Figures and other members of the federal Department of Justice. Then Morris Dees, chief trial attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center, gets wind of the case and knows he is going to use the lynching to bring down the United Klans of America (UKA) and its leader Robert Shelton.
Dees, it seems, knows racists from experience. Growing up in Alabama, Dees attended U of A and worked on George Wallace's gubernatorial campaign in college. Although Dees would graduate from law school, he focused his work on a mail order publishing business he started with a partner in college. After both finding they were unfulfilled with the business world, Dees and Fuller sell off their company and go their separate ways. Dees goes on to found the SPLC and Fuller begins Habitat for Humanity.
Dees evolution into a crusader against the UKA was a gradual process and by the time the civil trial starts, he's been trying and winning civil rights cases for some time. He definitely marches to his own drummer and does things his own way, but Dees had a singular purpose in this case, and that was to bring down the UKA in such a way that could be used in the future against other violent hate groups.
The best parts of the book, to me, were the background information regarding the civil rights movement and the campaigns of George Wallace. The courtroom battle fell a little short of "epic" to me, but Leamer is not an attorney himself and since most of the defendants were representing themselves, I doubt they produced many quotable arguments.
I picked up this book as my non-fiction selection for Black History Month. I may not have finished it in February, but I'm glad I read it.
4/5 Stars.
It's February and for Black History Month, I wanted to read something from an African American author and also something about Black History. The Book of Harlan is written by Bernice McFadden, an award winning African American author of nine critically acclaimed novels. The average Goodreads score on this book was 4.1 which is pretty fantastic.
So let's start with what's working in this book. McFadden's prose is well done and the first 1/4 of the book detailing Harlan's parents, Sam and Emma Elliott, who meet in Macon, Georgia and then after becoming pregnant with Harlan (much to the displeasure of Emma's preacher father), move around the country looking for the right fit, while the grandparents bring up Harlan. Finally, in Harlan's fourth year, Sam and Emma return to Macon for Harlan, having found their niche in 1920s Harlem. The pacing and the writing in this section of the book was the best part about the entire book. Even the parts that followed about Harlan's childhood and early adulthood in Harlem, playing in jazz bands and travelling the country was well done. And then, well then stuff started to get weird.
So about the midpoint of the book, when, in 1940, Harlan goes to Paris to play the jazz clubs there, unkowningly having fathered twin sons in Brooklyn, the suspense of the book started to ratchet up. When Harlan and his bandmate Lizard are picked up after curfew during the Nazi occupation of Paris, they are swept off to Buchenwald. Here I thought the book was going to settle in, and really delve into what it meant to be a black American in a German concentration camp. So I was completely surprised when this only took up a little more than two chapters. Much of this section of the book was Lizard's back story, which came a little too late as we'd already been introduced to Lizard for several chapters and well, then like many characters in this book, we never see him again. And although what happens to Lizard is terrible, he's in a concentration camp, you can probably figure it out, and it's supposed to be incredibly damaging to Harlan, there's something that is missing in the elements to give it a great emotional weight.
When Harlan returns to his parent's home, he's completely broken and suffering from PTSD for several years, until he isn't and all of a sudden is out womanizing again. He moves to New Jersey with his parents, plays in some clubs, then all of a sudden his parents are killed in a car accident and he's once again devastated. He takes a job in Brooklyn as a superintendant of a building. Great, I thought, he's going to end up meeting his children finally, since the book spent a significant portion of time on the mother of his children and her family, but no. Instead of his children, Harlan finds Ilse Koch, the notorious wife of a Nazi administrator of Buchenwald who took sadistic pleasure in torturing prisoners in her husband's camp. Ilse Koch has taken refuge in the United States, disguised as recluse Andrew Mailer. (Except Ilse Koch in reality was tried twice for war crimes in Germany and committed suicide in prison in 1967 at the age of 60).
Harlan, upon finding Ilse, strangles her to death and then turns himself into the police. Conveniently, the police detective who takes his statement has a wife who was also a prisoner at Buchenwald so he takes Harlan out the back door and sets him free, giving him all the money in his wallet and telling Harlan to make a new life somewhere. Harland decides to go to Macon, and then the book ends. YES! It ends there!
So about what kind of fell flat for me: the book takes on too much. There are too many characters who show up to ground the story into factual time and place, but their factual stories get distorted by the narrative into untrue endings (Ilse Koch).
There are also too many characters who are included, described in detail, only to be never seen again. The fact that we never know what happens to Harlan's twin sons was kind of a big gaping hole in the narrative. Yes, okay Harlan never met them, so if you take the story from only Harlan's perspective, then he didn't know what happened to them either, BUT in that vein, he never knew they existed in the first place, and he certainly didn't know anything about the family of the woman he slept with to make those children in the first place, but we had loads of details about those individuals in the story. It's almost as if they ceased to exist after the interesting portions of their own narratives were used up.
The dialogue at times worked against the story. McFadden can get into a good rhythm of prose wherein the story flows well and the plot is driven forward. When dialogue is used for this purpose it has less effect and comes out awkwardly.
Lastly, the scope of time taken on in this book was too great. Less time was spent on really interesting or complicated issues than were probably warranted given their weight and importance in the life of the characters.
Basically I thought the first half of the book was pretty good and the book would have rated higher if the second half would have included mostly Buchenwald with a bit of the later life wrapped up at the end. The murder of Ilse Koch in the final chapters seemed an effort to create a dazzling ending where one wasn't really needed. This is a man who survived four years in a concentration camp, that struggle, and the changes it made in him, and how it redefines how we look at victims of the Holocaust should have been enough. That it wasn't is somehow telling on how this book fell short.
2/5 Stars.
